Starting in 1885, the British (who colonized Burma) spent decades negotiating over the border between Burma, its colony, and Burma’s northern neighbor, China. The two countries’ very different approaches to cartography in the late 19th century played a role in shaping the border, according to new research from Eric Vanden Bussche, a Ph.D candidate in history at Stanford University.

“The Chinese understood the function of maps differently from the British,” Vanden Bussche told Stanford News. “Chinese mapmaking practices did not emphasize mathematical projections. For the Chinese, a map was a broad illustration of a region based on written sources.” For instance, 19th-century Chinese maps depicted landmarks and trade routes, but didn’t feature distance measurements.

A map of the Yunnan province dating from the Qing dynasty, which lasted until 1911.National Palace Museum, Taiwan

Xue Fecheng, a Chinese diplomat in London in the 1890s, “was aware that the map was the medium through which the Europeans constructed and negotiated space,” Vanden Bussche says. “He had to use a map rather than written sources to advance Chinese territorial claims.”

BOTH COUNTRIES TRIED TO ADOPT EACH OTHER’S MAPPING PRACTICES TO BE MORE PERSUASIVE ABOUT THEIR TERRITORIAL CLAIMS.

Neither side had accurately surveyed all the land in question, since much of it was controlled by chieftains who would change allegiance between Burma and China regularly. Much of the border drawn, therefore, just went through blank space on the map. But both countries tried to adopt each other’s mapping practices to be more persuasive about their territorial claims. They based their claims on their own methods of mapping, but the Chinese produced maps that resembled British maps, and the British relied on the written descriptions produced by Chinese gazetteers. “There is a very big effort on both sides to draw on each other’s spatial paradigms and notions of territorial sovereignty in order to make their demands palatable to the other side,” he says.

And Vanden Bussche points out that these kind of disputes aren’t a thing of the past. China is still engaged in a border dispute with India, and istussling with Japan over a group of islands in the East China Sea and with the Philippines over territorial claims over parts of the South China Sea–and China is still using maps like this one to make its case. Our knowledge of geography may have expanded considerably since the 1890s–thanks to satellites, you can examine the topographical features of land half a world away–but when it comes to drawing up the maps, there’s still no such thing as objectivity.

We asked, and you answered. Presenting the New York City Subway Smell Map, created with the able assistance of Gawker readers universe-wide. We’ve separated hundreds of reader smell reports into ten distinct categories of aromas: food, feces, vomit, sewage, perfume, alcohol, you name it. Glide your mouse over any subway station on the map to see the station name, subway lines, and smell categories. Click, and the popup expands to reveal Zagat-style excerpts from actual reader reports. Careful study and rote memorization of the smell map will allow you to navigate the subway system without even opening your eyes. Of course, you’ll have to train your nose to distinguish the local urine varietals at each station, but that’s a small price to pay. Note also that the map remains open to future submissions for stations not yet covered or stations currently under-covered. All due props to consummate mapmaker Will James at onNYTurf for use of his elegant subway map. Enjoy this finely interactive and cartographic work of investigative service journalism.

UPDATE: Hey, look, the map is fixed! Now it really works really well. For reals.

Frederic Kaplan has found an unconventional way to build a time machine. Rather than making a metal object (or, uh, a police call box) that whisks you through time and space, he wondered: Could a time machine be built out of information?

In today’s TED Talk, filmed at TEDxCaFoscariU, Kaplan previews the Venice Time Machine, a collaboration between Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne and Ca’ Fosari University, to make a geographical and historical simulation of this incredible city, whose past is perhaps the most well-documented in the world. The project is digitizing 80 kilometers of archives to re-create spaces that are now lost to time.

In a similar vein, Google recently opened up its Google Maps Engine, which lets ordinary people add rich data to Google Maps, so that “together we can organize the world’s geospatial information and make it accessible.” Last month, they revealed that…